Polemicists wrote their image of Islam to repulse Christians, not Muslims

Evidence

It is important to realise that the facts and the Islamic doctrines thus rearranged were put into a form which primarily repelled, and must have been intended to repel, Christians; Islam was, in fact, not always described in terms necessarily repellent to Muslims. No doubt there was much that a Muslim would have had to resent; but the unpleasant image of Islam that the Christians drew was drawn to seem unpleasant to the Christian eye. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1471

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to vault claims in Razack and Aziz that ‘the Muslim’ is constructed for Western domestic audiences, and to Anidjar’s genealogy of ‘the enemy Jew-Arab’ as constitutive outside.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s logic of moral panic as internal audience discipline; could feed a companion angle on how polemic about an enemy’s vices is always directed homeward.
• DEFINE: Clarifies how ‘the enemy image’ of a religious Other functions — a sociological mechanism of identity formation.